PR#159: British Rail rolling stock info

[Matthew]

When I first started playing this pakset, I found it difficult to choose the right rolling stock in the British Rail era. In the steam era, I knew that generally speaking an 0-6-0 is a good freight locomotive and a 4-6-2 is usually a good choice for express passenger trains, and so on, but I didn't know whether a Class 151 was for lightly-used passenger routes, dense commuter traffic or something completely different. So I made notes with basic data for AC locomotives and EMUs, diesel locomotives, and DMUs in the British Railways and subsequent time periods. I find it useful and others may too, especially those who are more familiar with railways outside Great Britain.

After I wrote these, most of this information became available in-game through the amazing new Vehicle Info Window that Ranran created. However, these files add three pieces of information that are not easily available there.

Firstly, they show acceleration data. It's not perfect, because the data does not take account of the weight of carriages, wagons, cargos, etc. However, it is much more easily available than the in-game data and will help to assess which vehicles are best for stopping services compared to expresses.

Secondly, they include information about the routes where the rolling stock was used in real life. That won't matter to minmaxers, but role-players such as myself enjoy using Scottish Region stock in the game's Caledonia Region.

Thirdly, the DMU and EMU data is presented as formations (consists) rather than individual vehicles. It doesn't include every possible formation, but tries to show the range of possibilities.

However, it doesn't include DC rolling stock, simply because I haven't used it in the game in recent years.

There is a readme.txt file with useful information and a key. Note particularly that these are plain text files that need your editor to have 8 characters to a tab to be readable. If the columns don't line up, you might need to use a monospaced font such as Courier New or Liberation Mono.

It can be incorporated as PR#159 if James thinks others might benefit from it. The PR tries to put them in a documentation subdirectory that might also be a good place for all the other background text files that are currently floating in the pakset's main directory. But the subdirectory looks weird on GitHub so it's possible I've messed that up somehow.

Or you can get them now here.

[jamespetts]

Thank you for that - now incorporated. I cannot be sure that this will be kept up to date, however.